Doubt

Great theater, but only an above-average film. Shanley wrote the perfect screenplay and found excellent collaborators, but Doubt only truly works as an acting concert and a duel between two opposing views of faith. As a film, it offers excellent music by Howard Shore, Deakins' colorful camera, but also a strangely distant director. Shanley tried to enrich the theatrical potential with visual means, but they have awkward theatricality and inelegance, which slows down rather than strengthens tension. This is unfortunate, because the acting and the final question that remains hanging in the air could easily have formed part of an exceptional film. It does not, although Doubt is undoubtedly a very good effort. (02/25/2009)

Interesting topic, excellent actors, but the whole thing kills it. What good is the amazing Amy Adams or the charismatic Hoffman to me if the entire premise of their actions can fit into ten minutes? Instead, I watch an hour and a half of stretched-out acting exhibition, pushed to the most absurd maximum. Occasionally, a little editing or hinting would have been enough, but no - the routine direction drags the film to an ending that ultimately undermines the whole story. It's precisely because the entire dramatic arc is a smaller deception for the audience that I have to rate it this low. (06/07/2010)

Well, I really wasn’t expecting this. It’s almost unbelievable how fittingly the name Doubt describes the film. There’s not a single moment when the viewer can be certain on whose side the truth is, or who has the purer or more noble motives, etc. This would have been impossible without a great script and dialogues, which I would appoint as king of all dialogues :-D… I really can’t remember when was the last time I swallowed like this every word uttered by the characters in a film. Praising the performances would be redundant, and I reckon this year the members of the Academy will have a very hard job. Just one more thing before closing, I wouldn’t have believed it before watching it, but I’ve just found “my” drama of the year 2008. (01/27/2009)

Before: I have considerable doubts about whether Shanley will be able to handle such tricky material while managing to avoid falling into cheesiness, needless literalness and ecclesiastic correctness. And mainly I have doubts about Amy Adams performance alongside the Hoffman Streep duo. After: I have no doubts anymore about Amy and also I now know that it couldn’t have been written, shot and acted any better. (01/22/2009)

I don’t know. From a Pulitzer winning story, I would have expected more than just a church song with weirdly glued-together motivations, mostly held together by the exceptional actors. The dialogues are fairly decent and the titular message works pretty intensively within a strongly unspoken and interpretively open framework, but they are nothing but shallow gimmicks of a good writer who doesn’t know how to work in the film medium or how to lead the attention of the audience. Something like this should be a lot stronger and less artificial. 60% (04/21/2020)